The O.J. Simpson jury members who delivered the 1995 criminal acquittal were twelve ordinary Los Angeles residents: nine Black, one Hispanic, and two White, ten of them women and two men. Their jobs included a vendor, a marketing representative, clerks, technicians, and retirees. Most had finished high school; some had college coursework or vocational training. They were sequestered for 265 days, longer than any American jury on record, and reached a unanimous not-guilty verdict in under four hours.
The Twelve Who Decided the Case
The panel that returned the verdict on October 3, 1995 was demographically unusual for a Los Angeles County criminal trial, and the composition became one of the most argued features of the case. Critics said the prosecution failed to counter a defense strategy aimed at seating jurors likely to distrust the LAPD. The jurors themselves later rejected the idea that race decided the outcome, saying the prosecution had not proved its case.
Their occupations were working- and middle-class: nobody on the panel came from a background that would have made the nine-month confinement financially or personally easy. That mattered, because attrition would soon test every one of them.
Named Jurors
Armanda Cooley, a 51-year-old vendor from South Central Los Angeles, served as forewoman. She later co-authored Madam Foreman: A Rush to Judgment? with fellow jurors Carrie Bess and Marsha Rubin-Jackson. The book laid out the panel’s view that the prosecution’s forensic case had been undermined by sloppy police work.
Lionel Cryer became instantly recognizable after the verdict when he gave Simpson a raised-fist salute in the courtroom. Brenda Moran was reported to be working on a separate book with fellow panelist Gina Rosborough. Annie Backman was later identified as one of the two jurors who voted guilty in the first straw poll before the panel reached unanimity. Tracy Hampton, a flight attendant, sat on the panel before her dismissal during the sequestration crisis described below.
How They Were Chosen
Judge Lance Ito required every prospective juror to complete a 79-page questionnaire containing 294 questions covering personal beliefs, media habits, and views on domestic violence and DNA evidence. Attorneys used the answers to map biases before oral questioning began.
Voir dire, the in-person questioning phase, stretched over several months. California law lets attorneys directly examine prospective jurors to uncover case-specific bias.1California Legislative Information. California Code CCP 222.5 – Trial Jury Selection Both sides used peremptory challenges to strike unfavorable candidates, and the defense team led by Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran was especially deliberate about shaping the final panel. Because nearly every candidate had heard about the case, lawyers focused less on finding people with no exposure and more on identifying those who said they could set aside what they already knew.
What Sequestration Was Like
Ito ordered the jury sequestered for the entire trial under his discretion in California law to keep jurors in the charge of a sworn officer.2California Legislative Information. California Penal Code 1121 – Separation or Confinement of Jury The jurors lived at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Los Angeles under constant supervision by sheriff’s deputies. The confinement lasted 265 days and cost roughly $2 million.
The rules were strict. Phone calls were monitored. Television access was limited. Newspapers were cut apart to remove trial coverage before jurors could see them. Tracy Hampton later said deputies searched rooms daily and that nearly everything the jurors did was done as a group. Several described the experience as prison-like.
The April 1995 Revolt
On April 21, 1995, at least thirteen jurors and alternates arrived at court dressed entirely in black. The silent protest halted proceedings. The trigger was Ito’s decision to reassign three sheriff’s deputies who had been guarding the jury, a move several jurors saw as punishment because they had grown close to those deputies.
The reassignment traced back to complaints Tracy Hampton had made about deputies’ conduct. When Ito responded by replacing the three, the rest of the jury turned on Hampton and stopped speaking to her. Ito spent the day meeting individually with jurors and alternates to restore order. Hampton was dismissed soon after, telling the judge she could not continue; she was later reported to have been diagnosed with acute stress, depression, and insomnia.
Dismissals and Replacements
Ten of the original twelve jurors were removed during the trial and replaced by alternates, keeping the case perpetually near a mistrial. By June 1995, only two alternates remained. The reasons varied:
- One juror was removed after it emerged she had worked at Hertz, the rental company Simpson had represented as a celebrity spokesperson.
- At least one juror was dismissed for failing to disclose during voir dire that she had been a victim of domestic violence, a central issue in the case.
- One juror was accused of gambling on the trial’s outcome.
- Tracy Hampton was released after telling the judge, “I can’t take it anymore.”
- Others were removed for medical issues or undisclosed conflicts that surfaced during the trial.
Each replacement required the judge to confirm that the incoming alternate had followed the same admonishments and could step in without creating appellate grounds. The constant turnover also destabilized the remaining jurors, who watched colleagues disappear one by one.
The Deliberation
After nine months of testimony and thousands of pieces of evidence, the jury began deliberating on October 2, 1995. The first straw poll came back 10–2 for acquittal. The two holdouts, one of them Annie Backman, were persuaded during the discussion that followed. Total deliberation time was under four hours.
On October 3, 1995, the court clerk read the verdict: not guilty on both counts of murder. More than 150 million people watched live. The jurors were released from sequestration and returned to private life. Under the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause, the acquittal permanently closed the criminal case.3Congress.gov. Amdt5.3.6.1 Overview of Re-Prosecution After Acquittal
What the Jurors Said About Their Decision
Several jurors spoke publicly in the weeks and months after the verdict, and their explanations consistently pointed to the prosecution’s case rather than a belief in Simpson’s innocence. Cooley said there was “a lot of reasonable doubt in the room” and that a guilty verdict was never realistic given what the jury had been shown.
The jurors were especially critical of how the LAPD handled evidence. Cooley and her co-authors wrote that officers had not followed basic procedures for collecting, bagging, or preserving blood evidence, and noted that the department had spent five years working on a procedures manual it still did not have. Marsha Rubin-Jackson said the jury learned a great deal about DNA when experts explained it respectfully, but that some prosecution witnesses “talked down to us like we were illiterates.”
The domestic violence evidence, which prosecutors had framed as central, landed with less force than expected. Jurors later said they had been shown only a limited set of incidents at trial and did not learn about the broader pattern until afterward. Brenda Moran called the domestic abuse testimony “a waste of time” in a murder case, a comment that drew heavy criticism but reflected what the jury had actually been presented in the courtroom.
A Note on the Second Jury
The twelve people described here decided the criminal case only. A separate jury heard the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in Santa Monica in late 1996 and early 1997. That panel was eight White members, two Black members, one Hispanic member, and one person of Middle Eastern descent, reflecting Santa Monica’s demographics rather than downtown Los Angeles. On February 5, 1997, it found Simpson liable and awarded the Goldman family $8.5 million in compensatory damages. The civil case operated under a lower burden of proof, and Simpson was required to testify, which he had not done in the criminal trial.